If this is a Memorial?

Monuments and memorials are reminders of the past, designed for the future, but conceived in order to serve the present. As built structures, they are erected for conferring dominant significations to space. Apparent or (seemingly) unseen, they are the expression of a visual memorial text, written in the public space, creating together a cultural utterance associated to one society’s collective memory. As spatial narrative structures, memorials lead us to sensorial and physical experiences containing hidden symbols. According to educational, cultural and sensitivity levels of the onlooker, the message is decoded and interpreted in different ways. Every interpretation is, in fact, a recreation of the host space, of the memory, in this case, a reinterpretation and a rewriting of it.

Recently (January 2020), in an interview, Peter Eisenman reminds us his conceptual universe connected to the moment when he designed the Holocaust Memorial from Berlin: „the meaningless of Shoah”. This extremely controversial space, in the first place, by means of representation, and then by the way of urban utility, led my analysis to another narrative, a literal one this time, namely If This Is a Man, the book of Primo Levi. This paper suggests a visual overlapping of the two narrative representations.